Rihanna settles copyright case with photographer LaChapelle

Pop singer Rihanna has settled the copyright dispute with photographer David LaChapelle. LaChapelle had claimed the music video for the singer's single 'S&M' contained elements similar enough to his photos for it to infringe his copyright. In July a New York judge rejected Rihanna's lawyer's attempts to have the case dismissed on the basis of 'fair use.' Terms of the settlement were not made public.

Comments

If Rihanna wanted a DLC video, she should have hired DLC. End of story. Her label has more than enough money to afford him. This was a clear cut case of copyright infringement right from the start. Anyone who thinks otherwise has little to no scope of what intellectual property is.

It seems to me that an individual work can be copied and hence copyrighted but not a photographer's whole oeuvre. I think that what is being contested here is not the intellectual theft of an idea in a photographic work but the theft of a commercial design idea or a trademark.

There's very little original being produced today so if you could, in theory, copyright a photographic style then it would put most pro photographers right out of business. Amateur photographers might get away with it but if they were under threat too then they'd stop taking photos or stop putting their stuff online through fear. Creative incentive would be stifled. It would kill the whole photographic manufacturing industry and the distribution industry to boot.

This case wasn't about "style." Emulating the style of another doesn't constitute copying. But in this case, it was obvious that the set for the music video was just an item-by-item copy prepared from the photo. The copied elements were really almost too numerous to count, right down to colors and patterns of numerous elements, and the scenery depicted as the view out the rear window. Blatant barely begins to describe it.

Personally I don get it. OK - I can at some emotional level despise just mimicking some others work so closely as Rihanna did. But ... is it unlawful? Is it breaking Copyrights? I dont think so. The entire artist scene is about mimicking. Its the basis for it all I would say. If everything have to be new and not based on previous stuff - then there would not be much left.

Personally I also think that trying a new angle on an old idea is very productive. So - using ta photo as the basis for another media - video - is something I would encourage.

And - the main reason for Copyright is to enrich the society with more art and culture, its not about enriching a specific artist and blocking art development.

"There's very little original being produced today so if you could, in theory, copyright a photographic style then it would put most pro photographers right out of business. "

No way! They could just start taking pictures of judges and politicians and their trysts and other dirty laundry. Some pros have lenses so long that they can snap a Washington DC bedroom all the way from Fresno!

I should say seriously however, it's fascinating that one's "style" can be protected. It should be interesting when all those red/blue "soup can" posters of Obama and others begin to end up in IP court cases.

Roland Karlsson: It is unlawful. What is illegal here is that her art director for the video took LaChappelle's picture as a guide and set up his setup as a copy in a studio. As simple as that. LaChapelle did not shoot some models at a location you can find elsewhere, in that case, Rihanna's video could have been shot that same location and nothing illegal would have happened.

Alternative Energy Photography: It is not his "style" that is copyrighted here... It is a rather simple case of his work being copied for profit by someone else. Which is illegal. We are not speaking software-patents here. Copyright is an old system that actually works quite well.

looking at DLC photograph and R's S&M still grab, it is quite clear David's "essential world" has been copied, re-created and re- built, this is not a scene you can just "find", it only exists in DLC photograph. R should have just hired him to shoot the video, DLC is a very accomplished video director!

But he might not have wanted to recreate a prior work for Rihanna. In that case, if "she" (her people) had asked first, he saying no, and they then decided to do this copy anyway, it would have cost them an arm and a leg (Current law specifies up to 3 times the gain, so 3 times her record and single sales and income from tv viewings etc...) Probably ruining her (Which would have been equally bad) so maybe, this was the "best" solution...

Copyright isn't always "right". Do you think Matthew Brady's pictures should be copy written? Lewis Hine? What about a newspaper who has a photographer under contract and chooses not to publish their photos for political reasons?

In this case the ripoff is blatant and it sounds like justice is happening.

No it isn't. Not when the overall effect here is to weaken the legitimacy of copyright.

Your photos, which you created, were taken from you and sold without your permission, and that's clearly wrong. But if your client paid another photographer to take new photos of them in a similar style to your photos, that would've been entirely within their rights. You should not be able to prevent another photographer from creating new works, no more than they could have prevented you from doing so.

A photographer owns their photographs. That is all. Not someone else's photographs or drawings or videos, no matter how similar or dissimilar the style or the palette or the content may be. No photographer (or videographer, or writer, or musician) deserves to take anything they didn't create.

However, if you setup some environment in a studio, an environment you design, which is not found "naturally", and shoot those pictures, you copyright that setup. Which means that if another magazine sets up an identical (to the definition of identical) setup and shoot their pictures there, because they don't want to pay for yours, then they are breaching copyright rules.

There is not much more to it. It is always a judgement if a setup is copied or not, you might create something similar, the border to when it is "identical" depends both on the complexity of the setup and the reason for setting it up. In this case, it looks like "We really like LaChapelles design here, it fits with the song, but we don't want to pay him for his work so we copy him..." And now they have settled for paying him for his original work. Possibly clever, since he might have said no to reproducing his work for Rihanna in the first place, and so the music video would have had to be different.

MadsR: It is an infrigement by conversion and distortion to use a recognizable element of an intelectual work without the original authors consent. This is clearly stated in the Copyright Act. I have not come accross anywhere in the Act the word "Derivative". If you could point me to it, I would like to confirm.